Food and Farm Labor – Civil Eatshttp://civileats.com
Daily News and Commentary About the American Food SystemFri, 09 Dec 2016 09:00:20 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1This Organic Food Company Doesn’t Discriminate Against Ex-Offenders—It Seeks Them Outhttp://civileats.com/2016/12/02/this-organic-food-company-doesnt-discriminate-against-ex-offenders/
Fri, 02 Dec 2016 09:00:09 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25986Mike Miles hadn’t had a stable job in years. He bounced around from temp agency to temp agency, never sure when his last day would be. Sometimes, he lost a position with less than a day’s notice. This wasn’t due to a poor work ethic—from arriving early to staying late, Miles says he did everything […]

]]>Mike Miles hadn’t had a stable job in years. He bounced around from temp agency to temp agency, never sure when his last day would be. Sometimes, he lost a position with less than a day’s notice. This wasn’t due to a poor work ethic—from arriving early to staying late, Miles says he did everything he could to build a good rapport with employers around Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But because Miles had a criminal record, he was always cut loose when it came time to let staff go.

“It was like walking on eggshells. You just never knew when you’d be gone,” he recounted.

After his release from prison in 2007, Miles struggled to find stability—both mentally and financially. During this time he lived in his mother’s house, and she helped him raise his daughter. When his mom passed away two years later, Miles says he became more determined than ever to create a healthy environment for his family.

“I’m all she has, and she’s all I have,” he said. “I had to build a whole new relationship with my daughter, while building a whole new life for myself.”

It wasn’t until October 2015, nearly a decade after he got out of prison, that a cousin told Miles about Lancaster Food Company, a local business that hires people who have difficulty finding jobs. This includes people with language barriers and disabilities—but the company focuses on hiring formerly incarcerated people.

Hoping this would clear up what felt like a thick cloud of uncertainty over his future, Miles submitted an application. He got an interview. And, soon after that, he began a new job, encompassing everything from food production to maintenance, not to mention a livable wage of $15 an hour. He says it’s the best job he’s ever had.

Miles’ scenario is rare in Lancaster, where the poverty rate holds steady at 30 percent—about double the national average. This figure riled Charlie Crystle, Lancaster’s co-founder and CEO. Crystle was raised in Lancaster but left in 1986 to purse a college degree and, later, a career in technology. He co-founded four tech companies, one of which sold for millions of dollars back in 2000.

Crystle is skeptical that many of Lancaster’s low-income residents can get started the way he did. “The big push is about technology, but it ignores a whole swath of the population that will never go that route,” he said.

He believes that food production is a key way to “meet people where they are,” referring to former offenders who may lack a high school or college degree. Lancaster produces products like bread and maple syrup, all of it USDA certified organic.

And Crystle wants it to grow. “The intention was never to start a mom-and-pop bake shop; it was to create a sizeable company where hopefully we can hire a couple hundred people,” he said.

The company is rapidly expanding, moving from a 1,000-square-foot space to one eight times larger by the end of this year. But, at just 16 full-time employees, including administration and owners, it doesn’t put a dent in the city’s poverty rate.

Crystle says he wants to inspire other companies and entrepreneurs to rethink their current practices and ignite conversations around minimum wage and employment opportunities for everyone, including ex-offenders.

Dan Jurman, who chairs the city’s Commission to Combat Poverty, believes Crystle’s business is a great way to make this happen. “None of us can tackle these issues alone,” he said.

Against the grain

According to the National Institute of Justice, having a criminal record cuts a job applicant’s chance of getting called back nearly in half.

Often, employers have an aversion to hiring people with criminal backgrounds, said Steven Raphael, an economist and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He points to the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, which asked employers whether they’d hire prospective employees who had a criminal background. More than 60 percent responded with “probably not” or “definitely not.”

Raphael’s research also suggests that even if certain companies don’t incorporate formal criminal history searches as a part of screening—and more than 80 percent of U.S. employers do—they rely on informal signals of criminality. Gaps in employment records, for instance, may preclude someone from getting a job.

Obstacles like this make it considerably more difficult for ex-offenders to transition back into life outside of prison. Raphael thinks part of the answer is more companies like Lancaster Food Company. “This is an important part of reentry—we want people to lead healthy, productive lives,” he said. “Most of the men and women coming out of prison are people of prime working age, and they need work just like everybody else.”

Polly Lauer, the firm’s chief operating officer, agrees. Pennsylvania allows hiring managers to ask about prior convictions, and for many workplaces, they’re an obstacle. “But I tend to look for those (resumes), as opposed to putting them in the wastebasket,” she says.

There are exceptions to that rule. Lauer refrains from employing two types of offenders—people convicted of pedophilia and rape—in order to protect the safety of employees (many of them female).

Everything else, including murder, Lauer feels can be reformed by the time someone comes back to work. She conducts extensive, probing interviews that run as long as two hours.

That approach is informed by Lauer’s background—she has a degree in psychology and has worked for organizations serving people with mental illness and histories of substance abuse. She says Lancaster Food Company is the culmination of her entire career.

Beyond providing employment and livable wages, the company also helps employees navigate the many challenges of reentry. Because many employees have a limited support network as well as personal obstacles, Lancaster tries to connect them to resources that go beyond simply providing them with a job. This means anything from helping them find housing and health benefits to changing their schedules so they can make court dates.

It also means a modest paycheck for Lauer and Crystle. Lauer took a pay cut in order to work at Lancaster, but says it’s a decision she doesn’t regret.

“If you look at our bottom line compared to a company that’s paying their employees half what we are and paying themselves a lot more than we’re paying ourselves, it looks very different,” Lauer said. “And that’s a choice.”

Not one employee has quit. According to Mike Miles, having a steady job has given him new courage.

As of last month, he is freshly engaged, the father of a 19-year-old daughter studying nursing, and in the market for a house.

“It don’t have to be a big house,” Miles said. “I just want to be stable.”

]]>If Trump Goes Hard on Immigration, Who Will Grow, Process, and Serve Our Food?http://civileats.com/2016/11/29/if-trump-goes-hard-on-immigration-who-will-grow-process-and-serve-our-food/
Tue, 29 Nov 2016 09:00:49 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25956We know that farmers overwhelmingly supported President-Elect Donald Trump in this election. But how does that support square with how his immigration policy could impact the agricultural workforce? And perhaps the more pointed question might be: If Trump goes through with his campaign promises, who exactly will provide the bulk of the labor that goes into producing our food? […]

]]>We know that farmers overwhelmingly supported President-Elect Donald Trump in this election. But how does that support square with how his immigration policy could impact the agricultural workforce? And perhaps the more pointed question might be: If Trump goes through with his campaign promises, who exactly will provide the bulk of the labor that goes into producing our food?

A Diminished U.S. Food Industry?

Undocumented workers are behind a lot of the food we eat in this country. There are about 2.5 million U.S. farm and agricultural workers and the estimates of how many are undocumented vary greatly. The U.S. Department of Labor puts the number at 30 percent, but other interpretations of this data, put it much higher—at 50 percent or more. And the nonprofit Farmworker Justice notes that such government figures are likely underreported because people are reluctant to answer questions about immigration status.

According to the Pew Research Center,about 20 percent of those working in meat processing and food service jobs—including waiting tables, washing dishes, and other restaurant and food prep jobs—are unauthorized immigrants. In total, about twice as many unauthorized immigrants work in food—including meat-processing as do U.S.-born workers. The same is true of those working as cooks. Altogether, low-wage food system jobs employ upwards of 5 or 6 million workers, so even the most conservative estimate of undocumented workers is significant.

While much of what lies ahead is still uncertain, any policy that would result in severe cutbacks could “create a major contraction of the labor force,” with significant impacts across the economy, said Minor Sinclair, director of Oxfam America.

The food production is undoubtedly one sector that would be hit the hardest. “There’s no question that farmers and ranchers—not just in California, but around the country—depend on an immigrant workforce,” said California Farm Bureau Federation spokesman Dave Kranz. “Our organization and others will be telling the [new] administration that we … need to be able to offer jobs to people who want them.”

Farmers “currently rely on ‘a huge skilled workforce already in America that are undocumented,’ and while farm groups aren’t looking for ‘amnesty’ for these workers, there needs to be a way for them to legally do these jobs in the U.S.,” American Farm Bureau Federation president Zippy Duvall said in a statement.

As we’ve reported in the past, the poultry industry also relies heavily on immigrant workers. The National Chicken Council said via email that it “looks forward to being able to secure a legal status workforce that will stay on the job long enough to become skilled and efficient, helping us to keep our food products and employees safe while helping to sustain the rural communities where we do business.” The Council also expressed support for “an effective occupational visa system” and “screening tools like a strengthened e-verify program.”

The National Restaurant Association declined to comment, but its post-election statement includes support for cuts in business regulations—including wage and benefit requirements.

Thinking back to the kind of illegal worker recruitment that landed Tyson Foods in court more than once, Farmworker Justice executive director Bruce Goldstein is concerned that a Trump administration could expand the current guest-worker or H2A visa program in a way that erodes workers rights.

He’s worried about increasing worker recruitment outside the jurisdiction of U.S. labor and civil rights laws, which, as he put it, “means slashing wage rates and reducing government oversight.” Yet he also added that because Trump’s policies would also harm employers, that might provide “some basis for compromise.”

Oxfam’s Sinclair echoed that sentiment. “We’re starting to have companies we’ve engaged with come to us and say, ‘We need to protect our workforce,’” he told Civil Eats.

Who’s Protecting Workers?

Food industry jobs have provided a foundation for generations of American families. Now there’s concern that Trump’s policies could lead to immigration raids, elimination of the Obama administration’s “Dreamer” (DACA) program, and widespread discrimination, upsetting life for millions of families across the U.S.

“The numbers Trump is using—3 million—that’s more than the estimated number of criminal immigrants. It’s not clear who he’s including,” Goldstein said. That fact, he said, is contributing to “fear among people who have no criminal conviction.”

“People are trying to figure out where they can be safe in their communities,” said Joe Morrison, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services, which advocates for agricultural workers in Washington state. “They’re figuring out if they will be able to get to work, to social services, to the store.” (In some cities, such as the ones that are pushing back against Trump’s efforts to end sanctuary city programs, residents might have an easier time than in others.)

“In small rural communities where I live and work, people are worried about what’s going to happen when we hit 2017,” said Morrison. “These are people who’ve lived in our community for years and years, have significant ties to our communities, and own homes. These are established families with multiple generations.”

For these reasons, groups like ROC United, Oxfam, and Farmworker Justice say they will continue their campaigns to support these workers’ rights at both the state and federal level. These include efforts to increase minimum wages (such as the Fight for 15 Day of Disruption taking place today in 340 cities), the right for union representation, and campaigns like the one in New York State advocating for a farmworkers’ bill of rights.

ROC United is also creating a “know your rights” document for restaurant owners, explained Lewis. The document will explain what restaurant owners can do to protect their workforce should there be any immigration issues—including raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Our hope is that the incoming administration doesn’t make life any more difficult for these hardworking folks than it already is,” said Lewis.

Beyond the ethical question, however, is a math equation that some feel just doesn’t add up in Trump’s 10-point plan promise to “turn off the jobs and benefit magnet.”

]]>The People Behind Your Food Are More Vulnerable Than Everhttp://civileats.com/2016/11/14/the-people-behind-your-food-are-more-vulnerable-than-ever/
http://civileats.com/2016/11/14/the-people-behind-your-food-are-more-vulnerable-than-ever/#commentsMon, 14 Nov 2016 09:00:40 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25691New data suggests workers across the food system are still struggling to feed themselves and their families. And it won’t get better under Trump.

]]>Shanita has worked as a server in restaurants for years. The Brooklyn resident, who preferred not to use her last name, says she’s often had to work two, three, and even four jobs just to pay the bills.

When asked whether she’s ever received benefits or sick days, she burst out laughing. “I got fired from a job because I was sick,” she counters.

Shanita is one of 20 workers whose experiences are documented in a new report out today called “No Piece of the Pie: U.S. Food Workers in 2016.”

The report comes from Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), a group that has been working for years to shine a light on the 21.5 million people who are employed across the five sectors of the food chain—from production to processing, distribution, retail, and service. The report, No Piece of the Pie, uses government data, academic literature, and in-depth illustrative interviews with workers to paint an updated picture of the bleak situation many of them face.

While the food system continues to create jobs, FCWA found, workers in this industry face low wages, few benefits, unsafe working conditions, and discrimination—in many cases at levels much higher than other industries. And although the research was conducted before last week’s election, it arrives at a time when low-wage workers are likely to be particularly vulnerable to cuts to our nation’s social safety net.

The Key Findings

According to the report, food is now the largest employment sector in the United States, after growing 13 percent from 2010 to 2016.

While the number of food sector jobs has increased significantly, they’re some of the worst jobs around. Food workers earn a median hourly wage of $10 per hour—the lowest of all industries in the country—and patterns of inequality have produced large wage gaps based on gender and race. Confounding the issue is the fact that the percentage of workers in the food system that are covered by union contracts has gone down.

Jose Vega, who worked in sanitation at a processing plant for Taylor Farms, a large supplier of packaged fruits, vegetables, and salads, was paid $9.50 per hour when he first started. “It was not enough to support your family, “ he said.

As a result, many rely on public assistance, with 13 percent of food workers, or 2.8 million people, using SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits (or “food stamps”) in 2016.

“I was surprised at the increase in the number of workers who are relying on SNAP benefits,” said FCWA’s co-president Joann Lo. “It’s really sad that the workers we depend on for our food every day have to rely on food stamps to feed themselves and their families.”

The rate of non-fatal workplace-caused injury and illness in the food production sector also went up, from 4.6 cases per hundred workers in 2010 to 5.5 in 2014. This rise didn’t surprise Vega, who detailed the dangers workers at Taylor Farms faced working with sanitizing chemicals.

“The chemicals in the drain … it would start smelling bad and some people couldn’t handle it. The smell was too strong and your stomach hurts and your eyes burn and you start getting a headache, and a lot of coughing,” he said.

He relayed one story of a chemical spill at the plant in 2015, when 12 workers were sent to the hospital. “The worst thing was, the next day, the manager … got all the workers together in the warehouse, and he told them, ‘you better not talk about what happened here. It might affect the company image and all of you guys might lose your job.’”

The Future for Food Workers Under Trump

One of FCWA’s biggest concerns is the impact the Trump administration will have on immigrants working on farms, in factories, and elsewhere. “We’ve already heard from workers who are really afraid and concerned—even more so than under Obama—that will they get fired, or there will be more discrimination against them because they’re immigrants, whether they’re undocumented or not,” says Lo.

She says her group has also heard from workers who are worried about losing their insurance if this administration overturns the Affordable Care Act, as both Trump and Republicans in Congress have said they will. “The majority of food workers are already on the margins, getting paid such low wages, and not having paid sick days and other benefits,” says Lo. “So losing their health insurance will be another devastating blow.”

The other concern is the impact on workers’ right to organize. “Trump will be able to bring people to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the enforcement of the law that oversees workers right to organize and collectively bargain,” says Lo. FCWA also expects that Trump and a Republican Congress will attempt to change the national right-to-work laws, and that will make it much harder for workers to organize and join the union. This is important because, “as we found in the research for the report, workers who are organized earn 26 percent more than those who are not,” adds Lo.

Unifying the Food Movement

During the same period the report covers, consumers were increasingly demanding local, organic food, and voicing concerns about how the food system affects personal health, the environment, and animal welfare. But Lo says she hasn’t always seen that concern translate to an effort to change circumstances for workers.

“So many of the workers in the food system are invisible to foodies and consumers overall,” she said.

The election could change that, if other activists and organizers in the food movement can come together, however.

Lo sees it as an opportunity for labor groups like FCWA to continue the work they’ve been doing for the last decade to build bridges with advocates working on environmental issues, public health, and fair prices for farmers. On a similar note, she is optimistic that impacted people in a range of communities—from Black communities to Muslims, LGBTQ, women’s rights groups, and immigrant workers—will “join forces” in the months and years ahead.

No Piece of the Pie offers specific steps both policymakers and consumers can take to improve job conditions across the food system, but Lo isn’t very optimistic about seeing anything change for food workers for the better on a national level under the next administration. She does however point to work at the local level, such as advocating for good food purchasing programs and other institutional buying efforts, as additional bright spots in a dim national political landscape. The passage of recent ballot efforts in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Maine that will eventually eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers were also hopeful signs, she adds.

Ultimately, says Lo, the recent changes will prompt a battle with little end in sight. “It’s not a choice.” She says, “We are going to organize and resist the policy changes that Trump’s administration is going to try to push through.”

]]>http://civileats.com/2016/11/14/the-people-behind-your-food-are-more-vulnerable-than-ever/feed/2Digested: Do We Need Farmers to Eat?http://civileats.com/2016/11/04/do-we-need-farmers-to-eat/
http://civileats.com/2016/11/04/do-we-need-farmers-to-eat/#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2016 09:00:28 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25657The answer might be more complicated than you think.

I hear this sentiment often. And there is truth to the phrase. Technically, there are always people behind everything we eat. And some of them are farmers.

In fact, there are many of us out there who pride ourselves on knowing, supporting, and appreciating farmers who dedicate themselves, quite literally, to feeding their communities.

But that doesn’t mean our relationship with farmers is as simple as it used to be. For years, “farmers” were people who had ownership over the farm (they stood to profit from the business on good years, and lose money on bad ones) and put in labor to grow the food. And we needed a lot of them to keep us all fed.

While some small-scale farmers still do some of the planting and harvesting themselves, the number is dwindling. And many of them just don’t produce a significant quantity of food anymore. In 2012, 57 percent of farms had sales of less than $10,000 (i.e., they were “hobby farms”).

On large farms, there are indeed farmers involved, but many function more like any other business owner does, and most now rely on some combination of farmworkers—a group of people who are generally given little or no ownership over the process—and machines to do the actual work of getting the food to our plates.

Over time, those large operations are likely to get larger, as the double-bind created by our aging farmer population (now averaging around 59 years old), and the ongoing drop in the number new farmers entering the field (operations that have been in business for five years of less went down 23 percent between 2007 and 2012) will continue to shift agriculture in an increasingly industrial direction.

Meanwhile, automation is fast becoming a common feature of the farm landscape. Between robotic lettuce and tomato pickers, automated milking parlors, and driverless tractors, machines are replacing people at a rate that is hard for many of us to fully comprehend.

Evan Fraser, Professor and Research Chair in Global Food Security at the University of Guelph and co-author of a recent op-ed about automated food production, says he’s seeing what he calls “a petty big uptake” of these technologies.

“Love it or hate it, this is happening. This is where the industry is moving,” he told me in a recent phone call.

“To be honest, there are very few humans involved in food production already,” he said. And while Fraser is optimistic that having more technology and fewer actual people on farms will also coincide with a reduction in the use of inputs such as fertilizer and water (thanks to huge leaps in sensor technology and big data), he admits that the picture doesn’t look good for communities.

“I think we can probably shrink agriculture’s ecological footprint,” he says. “But from a social perspective, there will be some negative consequences.”

Fraser says technology will likely allow for further consolidation in agriculture, and a shrinking number of farms that continue to grow in size. “This will continue a long-term decline in the vibrancy and density of rural communities,” he adds. And while he thinks there will be a few rural communities (mostly on urban edges) that succeed at defining themselves as hotspots for local, organic, and other forms of alternative agriculture, they’ll also probably continue to feed a small population of relatively affluent people.

Meanwhile, Fraser predicts that the scale of “capital-intensiveness is going to ratchet up with big data and the digital agriculture revolution to the point where full automation, or near-full automation is the norm.”

In other words: Not so many farmers behind our food.

I don’t think all food that is made on a human-scale is doomed to disappear forever. And I readily admit that without small-scale, sustainably-minded farmers, I wouldn’t be able to eat the food I like the most. On days when my life and my budget allow me to buy local, organic food direct from farmers, I don’t take it for granted.

But let’s stop pretending it’s the norm for most of us. Let’s also stop blindly equating “farmers” with “food” in a straightforward equation circa 1900. Instead, let’s do what we can to improve the circumstances for the bulk of the people who are involved in the modern food chain—from farmworkers, to warehouse workers, to truck drivers, to dishwashers. Because, even if they’re not seeing the profit, they’re often the ones who really make it possible for us to eat.

]]>http://civileats.com/2016/11/04/do-we-need-farmers-to-eat/feed/2Did Slaves Produce Your Food?http://civileats.com/2016/10/25/did-slaves-produce-your-food-forced-labor/
http://civileats.com/2016/10/25/did-slaves-produce-your-food-forced-labor/#commentsTue, 25 Oct 2016 09:00:38 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25583New report says 20 of the largest food and beverage companies need to do more to keep forced labor out of their supply chains.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), almost 21 million people worldwide are currently being held against their will and coerced to work under threats of intimidation, violence, economic or immigration status reprisal. The ILO’s latest estimate is that more than 3.5 million people worldwide now work under forced labor conditions in agriculture (including fishing and forestry). This means that forced labor has played a role in the supply chains of many of the most popular food and drinks.

Know The Chain (KTC), a nonprofit focused on corporate transparency, investigated how the 20 largest food and beverage companies are addressing this issue. Its new report found that most need to do far more to keep forced labor out of their supply chains.

In fact, scoring the 20 companies on various criteria for a possible high score of 100, KTC reports that, “Companies tend to score low across all themes assessed, with an average overall score of 30/100.” In other words, most of the food and beverage giants failed to get a passing grade.

Scoring highest—but with grades that would not rise above a D­—were Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé (see graphic below). Companies in the bottom third included ConAgra, Tyson Foods, and Kraft Heinz. Three of the four companies that scored less than 15/100 are headquartered in the U.S.: Tyson Foods, Kraft Heinz, and Monster Beverage, which scored a rock bottom 0/100.

When contacted about the report, companies that responded chose to highlight policies that address the problem. Only a few alluded to the actual existence of forced labor situations.

An Enormous Problem

More than a third of the world’s approximately 10.7 million forced labor victims who are not doing domestic work are working in agriculture. While forced labor is most common in agriculture in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, the ILO estimates that some 360,000 people are forced to work on farms in Latin America.

About 530,000 do so in developed economies, which include the U.S. and European countries. And while great progress has been made in eliminating forced labor in U.S. agriculture through efforts like the Coalition of Imokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, forced labor situations still exist here. According to the KTC report, an estimated 5 percent of U.S. farmworkers are victims of forced labor.

Also significant is the fact that food companies generate significant profits by using forced labor. The ILO estimates that forced labor in agriculture generates approximately $9 billion in annual profits. The ILO explains that while their conservative estimate of 3.5 million forced labor victims may sound high, it’s likely given that in “many countries, agricultural work is largely informal, and legal protection of workers is weak.”

This includes people working to grow cocoa, coffee, nuts, soybeans, sunflowers, and sugarcane in Africa and Latin America, and rice in Africa and India. It includes people harvesting palm oil in Asia, and fish and shellfish in Africa and Asia. It also includes people working on Latin American cattle farms and Thai poultry farms. Migrant and seasonal workers, in places like Europe and the U.S., are often working against their will. Apples in the United Kingdom and strawberries in Germany are among crops that have been recently shown to be picked by victims of forced labor.

Walking the Talk on Traceability, Accountability, and Standards

As KTC project director Kilian Moote told Civil Eats, the report is based on public disclosure—what these companies make public about their policies and practices—rather than on investigative reporting or on-site audits. What’s actually happening, Moote acknowledges, “is challenging to verify at an individual site, let alone at a global level.” That said, KTC took a thorough look at what these 20 food and beverage giants have published about their policies on accountability, standards, and traceability when it comes to hiring practices throughout their supply chains.

Moote acknowledges that the report simply offers a snapshot—but he adds that it’s an important one aimed at pushing companies toward greater and more comprehensive transparency throughout their supply chains. “To think that any country is immune to the problem of forced labor,” would be wrong, he says. “Hopefully this report can help companies rethink that.”

Most companies have begun to trace their supply chains but only oversee pieces of the chain. Over half the companies scored look closely at the source of their palm oil. A few also trace cocoa, soy, and sugar. Yet most fail to closely examine other ingredients at risk of using forced labor victims—such as nuts, beans, and seafood.

Most companies have standards in their contracts with suppliers that include a ban on forced labor. But only five companies actually assess risks of forced labor being used by potential suppliers. And none publicly provided evidence that they’d taken steps to reduce these risks by changing their purchasing practices—such as moving away from short-term contracts and pushing for the lowest possible prices, which can mean paying workers by the piece rather than by the hour.

Recruiters and third-party subcontractors are often the source of the worst labor abuses, because they provide the original company an extra layer of protection from criticism by removing the contact with the actual workers from their purview. All 20 companies that ILO examined scored low on this front; not a single one requires direct employment and most work through subcontractors and middlemen. Only two companies require their suppliers to audit recruiters and only seven require that no employment or other fees be charged to workers during any recruitment process throughout their supply chains.

Unilever, the company that received the report’s highest score, said in a statement, “We are pleased with the result of the scorecard but recognize that both Unilever, and the industry as a whole, need to work much more closely with suppliers and partners to achieve real change.” The company said it would “remain focused on increasing due diligence and building awareness and capacity in prevention, identification and, where necessary, remediation.” It also said it would “continue to partner with initiatives including the CGF Call to Action on Forced Labour and the Leadership Group for Responsible Recruitment.”

Coca-Cola’s director of global workplace rights, Brent Wilton, said in a statement, “We are aware that especially unskilled labor and migrant workers have little social protection and are vulnerable to exploitation and human trafficking.” He pointed to the fact that the company has evaluated forced labor risks on farms in countries like Guatemala and Honduras, and committed to ensuring, “that workers have access to their personal identity documents and do not have to pay recruitment fees.” The company also said efforts like KTC “can help drive improvements across our industry.”

Kellogg’s chief sustainability officer, Diane Holdorf said via email that the company (which scored only 32 points out of the possible 100) is “committed to respecting human rights in accordance with international standards” and is “working across our company and our supply chain to increase transparency and visibility to identify, elevate, and remediate human rights risks.”

And Tyson Foods, while not familiar with KTC or the report, said it has “programs and policies in place to help make sure our operations and suppliers are operating responsibly,” including a supplier code of conduct, a toll-free number, and web-based helplines that employees and contract workers in their supply chain can contact 24/7.

The Know the Chain report is primarily focused on influencing companies and investors, who may begin to see forced labor as an investment risk, says Moote. But that doesn’t mean that consumers can’t engage with the findings.

“We’d love to see organizations that are more oriented around consumers use this data,” he said. And he added, “Raising anybody’s consciousness about what you’re consuming from a social and environmental standpoint is really important.”

]]>http://civileats.com/2016/10/25/did-slaves-produce-your-food-forced-labor/feed/4Berry Pickers’ Win Could Result in Better Conditions for Many Farmworkershttp://civileats.com/2016/10/10/driscolls-berry-pickers-win-could-result-in-better-conditions-for-many-farmworkers/
http://civileats.com/2016/10/10/driscolls-berry-pickers-win-could-result-in-better-conditions-for-many-farmworkers/#commentsMon, 10 Oct 2016 09:00:18 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25477Farmworkers at Washington’s Sakuma Brothers farms have voted to join what could be the first union for Driscoll's berry pickers in the nation.

]]>For over three years, the workers at Sakuma Brothers farms in Burlington, Washington have been calling for a boycott. The farm supplies strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and more to Driscoll’s, the largest berry distributor in the world, and over the years, the workers have complained of inconsistent, piecemeal wages (that dipped below minimum wage), poor housing conditions, and the absence of paid break time.

Now, the workers have reached an important milestone: In September, they voted to be represented by Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), the first farmworker union led by workers who are indigenous to Central America. And they’ve called off the boycott for now. “This win ushers in a new era for farmworker justice internationally,” said FUJ in a statement.

Washington is the number one state in red raspberry production, number two in blueberry production, and number five in strawberries in the nation. Skagit County, where Sakuma Brothers is located, is Washington’s top strawberry producer. That crop is worth about $20 million annually. What happens in those berry fields is big business; the U.S. ranks number one in world blueberry production and number three for raspberries. Undoubtedly, labor relations in this industry can have a worldwide impact.

As FUJ spokesperson Maru Mora Villalpando told Civil Eats, “What workers wanted from day one, was to establish a process where they can negotiate directly with the management.” Now that’s what they’ll have. She also believes the group can set an example for other farms throughout the state.

“For these indigenous farmworkers, many of whom don’t speak Spanish or English, fighting for four years for the right to have a union—and winning that right—is tremendous,” said Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez.

Driscoll’s Americas executive vice president Soren Bjorn says the company is also “pleased with the outcome” of the election. “All along, we said that workers had the right to associate and if they want someone to represent them, they should have those rights and that should be honored,” said Bjorn.

He added that unionized workers are a rarity for Driscoll’s U.S. farms. While a number of berry pickers in Mexico work with unions, in California, where the company has most of its production, Bjorn said: “I don’t think we have anyone that is unionized,”

While Sakuma Brothers CEO Dan Weeden told Civil Eats that FUJ has “made a lot of claims, a lot of false claims and accusations,” about working conditions, he too supports the workers’ right to organize. “At the end of the day, if the workers want this, it needs to be their decision,” said Weeden.

Long Struggle and Landmark Strides Along the Way

This outcome did not come easily. “Through the past three years, workers have used different tools to press the company,” explained FUJ’s Villalpando. In addition to the boycott, tactics included strikes and walk-outs.

Although the workers have ended their boycott, Holt-Giménez says he’s personally going to wait until FUJ has negotiated a contract with Sakuma Brothers. “I’m not signing a contract with Sakuma Brothers and neither are any other consumers. Even though FUJ has called off their boycott, I think it’s important for the rest of us to maintain the boycott to continue to apply pressure for a successful outcome,” he said. (Update: Some activists are also encouraging consumers to continue the boycott due to the treatment of workers on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.)

Over the years, Sakuma Brothers workers have won other important victories. In 2015, the Washington Supreme Court decided unanimously in their favor when they asked to be paid for rest breaks in addition to how much fruit they picked. The court also said workers must be paid for rest break time at the same rate they earn when they’re picking, not just the minimum wage. This decision applies not only to Sakuma Brothers farmworkers, but to all of Washington state’s estimated 200,000 seasonal farmworkers.

As Villalpando explained, Sakuma Brothers’ berry harvesters, like many other Washington farmworkers, are paid a piece rate for how much they pick. “Workers don’t know each day how much they’re going to be paid,” she explained. Weeden says the company’s farmworkers make an average of $17 per hour, with some earning $20, $30 or more an hour. But this is based on the volume picked, and is never a guarantee. Neither the company nor FUJ are sharing details of the negotiations but The Stranger has reported that the union will be asking for a guaranteed minimum of $15 per hour.

Wages have not been the only issue for Sakuma Brothers workers. They’ve also been fighting for the right to organize and over housing policies.

In 2013, when organizing efforts began, the company reportedly hired security guards to patrol the farm’s labor camps. When workers went on strike in protest, many were fired.

But in 2014, a local Superior Court agreed with workers that this was an intimidation attempt and that workers who had gone on strike should not be barred from returning to their jobs. Workers had also complained that farm staff had used racist and disrespectful language—and often in relationship to the workers’ indigenous identities.

“Most FUJ workers are from the Oaxaca and Guerrero regions of Mexico and speak Mixteco and Triqui,” Villalpando explained. “Some are bilingual in Spanish and some are trilingual in English as well,” but not all, she said.

Sakuma Brothers workers also brought a court case against the company for a housing policy to exclude their families from company housing, which they said was imposed as retaliation for their effort to unionization. The farmworkers also won that battle when the same court told the company it had to provide housing for workers’ families—not just the workers themselves.

“It is really David and Goliath,” said Holt-Giménez. “It also a testament to the courage of the farmworker families. If they’ve gone out on strike, and they’ve been doing this for four years, it means conditions have been unacceptable,” he said.

Sakuma Brothers’ Weeden maintains that the company’s pay is among the highest in their industry and that housing conditions are good. Both Driscoll’s and Villalpando say improvements have been made since 2013.

Big Demand for Perfect Fruit at Low Prices

“I don’t think people realize how difficult and how challenging it is to be a family farm like Sakuma Brothers,” said Weeden. Climate change, weather, market prices, and competition from other countries with lower prices are all challenges, he explained.

A lack of “workable, logical immigration laws,” is another big challenge, said Driscoll’s Bjorn. The fact that the U.S. National Labor Relations Act does not cover agriculture also means farm owners in most states—including Washington—don’t have a clear legal process to follow when workers want to unionize.

As the largest berry provider in the world, Driscoll’s has “a tremendous amount of leverage in the marketplace and in what they can demand from their suppliers,” said Holt-Giménez. And allowing workers to organize and conduct equitable negotiations with farm owners to secure good labor conditions is essential to supplying “good, clean berries,” he explained.

“Sakuma Brothers has always been one to take the high road,” said Weeden. “What we want more than anything is to make sure we’re doing things right. Our company is just trying to figure out how to survive,” he said.

And companies like Driscoll’s have raised market expectations in ways that put pressure on farmworkers, Villalpando explained. “People want fruit throughout the whole year. There’s a big demand to have fruit and vegetables that are perfect at a very cheap price,” she said. “These berries are seasonal and we should understand how difficult it is to pick them,” she added. If the price of berries has to rise, that would mean “you’re actually contributing to better labor conditions of those who work in the fields,” she explained.

Of FUJ’s achievement she concluded, “This is an historical move. It’s a huge honor to support this movement.”

]]>http://civileats.com/2016/10/10/driscolls-berry-pickers-win-could-result-in-better-conditions-for-many-farmworkers/feed/4This Cooperative Grocery Store Wants to Break the Diversity Moldhttp://civileats.com/2016/09/20/this-minneapolis-cooperative-grocery-store-is-working-to-break-the-diversity-mold/
http://civileats.com/2016/09/20/this-minneapolis-cooperative-grocery-store-is-working-to-break-the-diversity-mold/#commentsTue, 20 Sep 2016 09:30:55 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=25361The Seward Community Co-op in Minneapolis built its new Friendship store as a reflection of the community where it’s located, and hired a majority of people of color.

]]>At a few minutes before 8 a.m. on a weekday morning in Minneapolis, there’s a small crowd of people waiting for the front door of the Seward Community Co-op Friendship Store to slide open for the day. They stand under a sign that says, “Everyone Welcome,” and it seems true when Jerry Williams, a department manager, arrives to unlock the door. “Let me at ‘em!” he says and greets the waiting shoppers like old neighbors, even clasping hands with a few of them before they go inside.

Things haven’t always been so harmonious between the community and the cooperative grocery store. For 44 years, the Seward Co-op has been an anchor in the Seward neighborhood, where it operates a grocery store and, more recently, a restaurant. In 2013, the co-op announced it was going to spend $11.5 million to open a second grocery store about four miles southwest of Seward in the Bryant neighborhood.

At the time, the people who ran the co-op assumed the community would welcome the new store. There wasn’t a conventional grocery store within a 2-mile radius of the new site, much less one selling organic or fair trade food. The new location, called the Friendship Store, after the Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church that once occupied the space, would supply more than 80 new jobs, and 2,000 of the co-op’s existing member-owners already lived in Bryant.

But some community members worried that the new store would bring gentrification, and wouldn’t actually serve the people already living in the neighborhood. According to the 2014 census, Minneapolis has 39 percent people of color overall; 66 percent people of color live in the Bryant area, and 44 percent of people of color live in Seward.

“[The community] challenged Seward in a number of ways,” says Raynardo Williams, manager of the Friendship Store. They wanted to know: “How were people going to manage the food prices? If you’re bringing forth jobs in the area, are people in the community going to get those jobs?” As a historically African American community with a large Latino population, Williams says, the resounding request was: “When we walk in the store, we want to see people who look like us.”

Their concerns were not unfounded. Cooperative grocery stores primarily sell organic and fair trade products. According to Consumer Reports, prices for organics vary wildly: On average they cost 47 percent more than conventionally produced food, but that can rise to over 300 percent. Proponents say these prices reflect the true cost of food, an equation that includes the often invisible social, environmental, and health costs of conventional farming. Opponents counter that the price often outweighs any benefits organics may offer, as it can create a barrier to access for low-income folks.

For this reason, the Seward Co-op’s Friendship store can be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between those working for sustainability and those working for food justice. And while cooperative grocery stores have not traditionally hired minorities, Williams believes that the store is not alone in trying to meld two different, but important, elements of today’s food movement. “The cooperative world is identifying the need to make a shift,” he says, “because, outside of providing access to great food, equitability and inclusivity are fundamental to the purpose of the co-op, and that means you should have a diverse and inclusive staff.”

Illuminating the Problem

Marjaan Sirdar, board chair of the Bryant Neighborhood Organization (BNO), says the first community meeting with Seward Co-op revealed that its leadership didn’t see the depth of its diversity challenges. “We asked them about staff diversity, and they proudly said they had 14 percent people of color,” Sirdar says. “That told us who we were dealing with—they were completely clueless about how institutionalized racism works. We let them know that was highly unacceptable.”

The BNO and the Central Area Development Organization (CANDO), another community-based group that has been vocal about the Friendship Store’s potential impact, are neighborhood improvement organizations. They both came out of Minneapolis’ 1990 to 2011 Neighborhood Revitalization Project, which enrolled communities in creating action plans to address things like transportation, green space, housing, and energy and water conservation.

In 2015, as the Friendship store was getting ready to open, leaders from CANDO drafted a 10-page Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that, among other things, required Seward Co-op to double their needs-based discount to 20 percent, pay employees $15.00 an hour, and hire 70 percent people of color with a preference for folks from the neighborhood. A community council would oversee the agreement, and it could fine the co-op $1,000 a day for infractions.

Seward Co-op did not sign the agreement, arguing it wasn’t fiscally possible. “We represent 16,000 owners,” says Williams. “We have to make decisions that will put the organization in a place where it can continue for the next 40 years.” CANDO and BNO petitions to force Seward Co-op to sign the CBA failed to gain traction. Subsequently, the co-op hired a negotiator to help both sides come together to set common goals, and agreed to work with BNO to craft a Mutual Benefits Agreement outlining a partnership to address the needs of the community.

That agreement has been mutually put on hold, but Seward Co-op’s efforts to meet the community’s concerns have continued.

Change Requires an Investment of Resources

Williams says the co-op was actively addressing the Bryant community’s concerns even before the CBA was drafted. For example, the co-op increased access to its goods with a new need-based program called Nourish, in which members pay a reduced co-op ownership fee. Nourish members receive all the ownership benefits: a share of the co-op, voting rights in selecting the board of directors, and if the store has a successful year, a patronage refund.

It also includes a 10 percent everyday discount. “The Nourish program allows us to bring in pantry staples, canned beans and things of that nature, and charge the bare minimum for them,” says Williams. “We also offer classes, such as how to shop the co-op on a budget, and we’ve created recipes that allow you to feed a family of four on less than $10.” To date, 1,126 owners at both co-op locations have enrolled in Nourish.

The co-op also committed to a hiring goal of 32 percent people of color by 2019, and to hiring people from the Bryant community. In order to do this, the co-op hired food justice advocate LaDonna Redmond as its community education coordinator. In the 1990s, Redmond had worked to bring organic produce to Chicago’s West Side, planting urban farms in vacant lots and starting farmers markets. She had also tried to open a community-owned grocery store, but the largely African American community—which had no exposure to the cooperative structure and simply wanted good food—had rejected the idea. Redmond knew something about Seward Co-op’s challenges.

Initially, her role at the co-op was to build relationships in the Bryant community, but she says it turned out that work was as internal as it was external. Redmond brought in Beth Zemsky, a local consultant specializing in organizational development to help the co-op unpack the internal processes and bias that had created its majority white staff—and change quickly.

Redmond credits co-op leadership with showing up to do the cultural competency work, which was often heated and humbling. “If I didn’t have a general manager who had undergone diversity training and understood exactly what we needed to do as a co-op and was willing to invest in the resources, we never would have been able to make these changes. No way,” she says.

Creating a Diverse Pool of Candidates

Community members were frustrated to hear that, when pressed on why it had hired so few people of color, the co-op answered it was just hiring from its pool of applicants. “I don’t buy that argument,” says Sirdar. “I’m not a business man, I’m a teacher, but I know the greatest need for jobs [in Minneapolis] is in Bryant and in the communities of color.” The Bryant neighborhood has an unemployment rate of 12 percent; Minneapolis, 9 percent.

Prior to the Friendship Store, the co-op relied heavily on word of mouth to fill positions. To get more people of color and people from the neighborhood into its pool of applicants, it held a job fair at a community center in Bryant. The job fair and the open positions were advertised with local African American and Latino radio and newspapers. The co-op also partnered with Bryant community organizations, such as HIRED, an employment agency that works with dislocated, low-income, welfare-transition and new immigrant workers. And it knocked on doors. “Communities of color require a conversation,” says Redmond. “You can’t just mail them a flyer and think they’re going to go, ‘Oh, this is wonderful.’ You have to get out and meet people.”

In preparation for the job fair, the co-op added questions about cultural competency to its interview process and rewrote job descriptions to emphasize essential skills over experience. For example, a person who worked in an auto shop may not come in speaking the language of the cooperative. “But you don’t need that to bag groceries,” Redmond says. “You need to be attentive to detail, able to lift 50 pounds, and have great customer service skills. We can teach you the difference between gluten free and organic.”

More than 400 people attended job fair and 100 of them were hired. “It was a wildly successful day,” says Redmond. The majority of the new employees were for the Friendship Store, and when it opened, the staff was over 60 percent people of color—primarily from the neighborhood. Seward Co-op employees earn a minimum of $12.82, the living wage in Minneapolis. All full-time positions come with benefits, and about 75 percent of the staff of the Friendship Store is full time. The co-op says that, factoring in benefits, staff “earn at least $15 per hour.”

The co-op also changed its onboarding process to be more inclusive. In the past, new staff learned a co-op history that began with a photo of 10 white men looking very serious at the turn of the last century. Now they get a broader introduction that includes all cooperative movements, including African American mutual aid and benevolence societies. Redmond says, “Being able to infuse our training with the cultural understanding we’re learning helps people find their place at Seward Co-op and feel pride in what they’re doing.”

Can the Larger Co-op Landscape Work Toward Diversity?

As Williams suggested, the push to hire people of color isn’t unique to Seward Co-op. According to a spokesman for National Co-op Grocers, a business services cooperative representing 200 food co-ops, diversity initiatives are a national focus.

“If it isn’t a trend, co-ops are in trouble,” says Leila Wolfrum, general manager of Durham Co-op in North Carolina. “Becoming a network of stores that is welcoming and geared toward a broad population is essential for co-ops going into the future. It embodies all the values co-ops have always had, we’re just at the front of the wave of implementing co-op values with diversity and equity in mind.”

The Durham Co-op has been open for a year and a half and employs 45 people, 32 of whom identify as people of color. “I think it’s important to recognize that diversity is not something we’re doing solely for the health of the community,” says Wolfrum. “It’s for the health of store.”

No End to the Challenges

“I love working in my neighborhood,” says Kiara Madison-Cook, who staffs the deli at the Friendship Store. She likes the work and has learned a lot—she’s currently getting into cheeses. But she says the most gratifying part of her job is the interaction with her neighbors: “They come over and say, ‘I’ve never been to a co-op before,’ or ‘I would never come to a place like this.’ Those are the people who make me happy to be here.”

Since the Friendship Store opened, it has sold 2,111 new ownerships to people in the Bryant zip code. Currently, the Friendship Store staff is 56 percent people of color and 55 percent people from the neighborhood. As a larger organization, the Seward Co-op is also ahead of its initial goal, with 36 percent people of color on staff.

Madison-Cooke says the “Everyone Welcome” sign resonates with the community when they come into the store and see people like them working. Yet she worries that could change. “Without [another] job fair that explicitly says, ‘We want people of color and people from the neighborhood,’ it might go back to being just people who want jobs.”

Sirdar has the same concern. He says he’s heard that the staff is already “getting more white.” “They need to institutionalize their retention of Black and Brown staff, otherwise it’s almost like they did it to save face.” He’d like to see Seward Co-op commit to maintain 70 percent people of color on staff, so that the store more closely represents the makeup of the Bryant community.

According to Williams, many of the original job fair hires still work at the store, which is significant because high staff turnover is the normal in retail stores. “People want a clear path forward,” Williams says, “so we have to do a good job of communicating training opportunities, and we have to make sure they see staff of color in leadership positions.”

After the Friendship Store opened, Redmond’s title changed to “diversity and community engagement manager,” a leadership role created to shepherd the day-to-day work of diversity and a demonstration of the co-op’s commitment to do it. “I can name about 50 projects right now, areas where we need to grow,” she says. “That’s the thing we’re learning at the Seward Co-op. The work is always the work, it’s never going to be, ‘Oh, we’ve arrived, and we are done.”

And yet she’s optimistic about the co-op’s work and what it represents for the food justice movement. “This project gives me hope. People of color can build and own cooperative grocery stores. It’s going to happen.”

]]>The average American ate more than 90 pounds of chicken last year—more than ever before. At the same time, the United States’ top two chicken producers—Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride—are reaping record sales and profits. Last year, Tyson reported more than $41 billion in sales and double-digit profits while Pilgrim’s Pride’s profits rose 17 percent in the same year. Yet missing from these enthusiastic sales reports is any mention of the enormous toll this industry takes on its workers.

In fact, poultry processors work in some of the most dangerous conditions in the food system. They suffer serious work-related injuries and illnesses at rates almost double those for other private industry workers, says Eric Harbin, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Dallas Region deputy regional administrator. And these injuries are often “gruesome,” says the Department of Labor.

In August, an OSHA investigation of such an incident—a finger amputation at the Tyson Foods chicken processing facility in Center, Texas—led to one of the biggest fines against the industry. While investigating the amputation, OSHA discovered 15 serious and two repeated violations at the plant. Among these were a lack of safety guards on moving machine parts, like the one where a worker lost his finger while trying to remove chicken parts that had jammed a conveyor belt. The company now faces $263,000 in proposed fines.

“These are some of the largest fines given in one inspection to a poultry company,” explained Deborah Berkowitz, National Employment Law Project senior fellow and former OSHA chief of staff.

OSHA inspectors also found Tyson Foods had failed to provide the Texas plant workers with protective equipment or training for using peracetic acid, a disinfectant that can cause burns and respiratory illness. In addition, OSHA cited the company for slippery floors, falling crates, and trip-and-fall hazards. Tyson Foods was also cited for fire hazards posed by improper chemical storage—also repeat violations—and unsafe levels of carbon dioxide at the plant.

“As one of the nation’s largest food suppliers, [Tyson] should set an example for workplace safety rather than drawing multiple citations from OSHA for ongoing safety failures,” said David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for OSHA in a statement.

An Industry Plagued by Hazards

Tyson is far from alone in their approach to labor. A look at OSHA inspection records show that Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Foster Farms, Sanderson Farms, and Wayne Farms all have records full of chronic safety hazards.

“It seems like there’s a culture in this industry of treating workers as replaceable,” she said. According to the Government Accountability Office, the industry’s workers typical earnings barely clear federal poverty levels for a family of four.

What also makes this work so dangerous are the incredible speeds at which workers must process poultry—more than 100 chickens per minute. (The Department of Agriculture proposed raising this speed to 175 birds per minute back in 2012 and this proposal may creep into an amendment to the 2017 federal budget bill.) Workers are also often crowded, leading to what Berkowitz calls “neighbor cuts.” In one such accident at a Foster Farms plant, a worker’s liver was punctured with a 5-inch blade when he and a coworker bumped into each other and one slipped.

“The pace of work is so fast. It is cold, it is slippery, there’s water and peracetic acid being sprayed on the meat,” said Berkowitz. “There’s a relentless drive to produce chicken at the cheapest possible cost. And they go at inhuman speeds,” she said.

Kendrick, a young African-American man who was interviewed by SPLC for their recent report on poultry processing, developed carpal tunnel syndrome as he worked the deboning line at a plant. The report reads:

When he asked the nurse for a lighter work assignment, she let him know there were consequences for such a request. “Do you want your job?” she asked him. “It’s a house of pain in there,” Kendrick said.”

Recent changes in U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) meat inspection rules also means companies now use more disinfectants than they did previously, Berkowitz explained. “Chicken gets repeatedly dipped in these vats of chemicals.”

These speeds and production pressure has also led to chronic lack of break time—including bathroom breaks—for poultry plant workers, as Oxfam America recently documented.

A Tyson foods poultry plant worker named May with whom I spoke for a recent story for In These Times, explained that the company only allows her to use the bathroom twice per night. “That is not enough for people,” she said.

“The lack of bathroom breaks is representative of the larger lack of respect for the workforce,” Oxfam U.S. domestic program director, Minor Sinclair told Civil Eats.

New OSHA Program Leads to Inspections—and Citations

These problems are far from new. Given this history, to help address these ongoing safety hazards, in October 2015, OSHA began what’s called a “regional emphasis program,” focusing on poultry processing plants in the Southeastern U.S., home to several of the country’s top chicken-producing states. The year-long program is designed to reduce employee injuries and illness and to ensure that the industry properly records all work-related injuries and illnesses.

OSHA’s recent announcement of Tyson Foods’ Texas plant violations is a result of this program. So is OSHA’s unprecedented citation of Pilgrim’s Pride—announced in July—for 22 safety and health violations, including failure to ensure workers use hearing protection, a lapse that caused 16 Pilgrim’s Pride workers to suffer hearing loss in 2015. But what made the citation record-setting was the fact that for the first time, OSHA cited the poultry industry for failing to make timely medical referrals for workers injured on the job.

Again, Pilgrim’s Pride is not alone in its failure to make such medical referrals. One notable case occurred at a Wayne Farms plant in Jack, Alabama, where OSHA found one worker who was seen by the company’s nursing station 94 times before being referred to an outside physician.

“These violations will trigger the new rules,” he explained. The rule is aimed at getting companies that supply food to federal institutions such as the U.S. Defense Department and USDA to clean up their acts—and make sure those who, as Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez said, “cut corners at the expense of their workers,” don’t “benefit from taxpayer-funded federal contracts.”

Tyson’s labor and safety record has already lost the company contracts with the Los Angeles Unified School District under the district’s Good Food Policy. “The procurement rules are going to have even a bigger bite than the enforcement rules,” said Sinclair. But he adds that even the biggest fines OSHA can levy may not be “significant given the companies’ earning.”

When asked about the OSHA citations, Tyson Foods said in a statement to Civil Eats, “We never want to see anyone hurt on the job, which is why we’re committed to continual improvement in our workplace safety efforts.” Tyson Foods’ statement also said it “fully cooperated” with OSHA’s inspection and intends “to meet with OSHA officials in an effort to resolve these claims.” Similarly, Pilgrim’s said via email, “We are working with OSHA to review the allegations in detail, with the goal of continuously improving our ability to provide a safe work environment for our team members.”

A Role for Consumers, Say Labor Advocates

Until recently, poultry industry labor issues have not attracted much widespread consumer attention, said Sinclair. But that’s starting to change. Oxfam’s recent report received a significant amount of media attention with frank headlines such as “‘I had to wear Pampers’: The cruel reality the people who bring you cheap chicken allegedly endure.” Oxfam also delivered to Tyson headquarters a petition with 150,000 signatures demanding safe, fair working conditions.

“We need to make the case to consumers and retailers that this is something they need to think about,” said Berkowitz. Consumer pressure has changed animal welfare practices, she noted. “We need to elevate consumer awareness not only of inhumane treatment of animals but also of workers.”

]]>http://civileats.com/2016/09/06/big-trouble-with-big-chicken/feed/2How One Groundbreaking Set of Rules is Changing the Food in L.A. Schools and the System Behind Ithttp://civileats.com/2016/06/27/good-food-purchasing-policy-is-changing-the-food-in-l-a-schools-and-the-system-behind-it/
http://civileats.com/2016/06/27/good-food-purchasing-policy-is-changing-the-food-in-l-a-schools-and-the-system-behind-it/#commentsMon, 27 Jun 2016 09:30:26 +0000http://civileats.com/?p=24910The Good Food Purchasing Policy specifies that everything the students in LA Unified School District eat must be local, sustainable, humane, fair, and healthy. And it’s becoming a model for the nation.

]]>Daniel Blackwood has witnessed a couple of big changes since he started working as a delivery driver for Gold Star Foods, the food distributor for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), three years ago. For one, the quality of the cafeteria food is better.

“The food is nothing but fresh and healthy,” says Blackwood. “Before, the kids were able to eat whatever they wanted to; sodas were allowed in the schools, and the staff didn’t stress that they needed an item from all of the food groups. Now, the students have a meat, dairy, fruit—a well-balanced meal.”

Healthier food isn’t the only area of improvement. Blackwood, a union shop steward who helped unionize other Gold Star drivers in 2015, also says that labor practices at Gold Star have improved.

“Everyone is treated with respect, we’re making good wages now, our benefits are great, and every driver is now happy,” he says. “It’s a completely different place to work. We all feel secure because there is more transparency. The company makes it a point to tell us everything that’s going on.”

At first glance, improved conditions for the drivers and better food at LAUSD may not sound like they’re related, but both changes can be directly traced to something called the Good Food Purchasing Policy (GFPP). The policy directs tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds spent on institutional food to support five overarching values: local economies, environmental sustainability, fair labor practices, animal welfare, and healthy food. The policy was developed, with input from multiple stakeholders, by the Los Angeles Food Policy Council in 2012.

Most comprehensive policy in the country.

The council wasn’t the first group to draw the connection between the billions of dollars spent each year on food procurement by schools, hospitals, and other public institutions and the larger task of building a healthy, equitable, and sustainable food system. Nor were they the first to push for supply chain transparency from farm-to-fork. But the policy is the first to use a values-based, point-system rating (like LEED certification, but for food). It has been credited as the most comprehensive in the nation, and the only one to give equal weight to worker welfare.

Stephanie Ewing, vice-president at Gold Star Foods, says the adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Policy gave the company an opportunity to apply a “values-based approach” to purchasing. What’s more, they can quantify whether to work with producers using a clear set of metrics, goals, and benchmarks based on the policy’s guidelines.

The council developed the policy in 2012. In October of that year (on National Food Day), the Los Angeles mayor’s office and the city council pledged to uphold the policy, issuing an executive order to all city departments to follow the five values when buying food. Weeks later, the LAUSD school board signed on to the GFPP. It was a significant statement by the largest public school district in California, which serves upwards of 650,000 meals a day and spends $125 million on food every year.

“We know that school districts and other public institutions are buying billions of dollars worth of food in the U.S., which is just mind-boggling,” says Alexa Delwiche, executive director of the Center for Good Food Purchasing in Berkeley, and one of the authors of the original GFPP. “There is a public contracting process where elected officials are asked to approve contracts for large amounts of money—and they haven’t thought about the power they have in influencing supply chains. In Los Angeles, the school board and city council members had an a-ha moment where they realized they could make serious changes through the contracting process.”

Power of public contracts to shift purchases.

The power of the public contract became clear in early 2016 when LAUSD’s renewal of a five-year contract with Tyson to supply the district’s chicken came under scrutiny. Citing the GFPP, organizations like the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) argued that Tyson did not meet the baseline value for employee welfare, and should not be awarded the multi-million dollar contract. They cited OSHA violations, and disregard for sustainability and the basic dignity of poultry workers. Eventually, the school board assigned the chicken contract to Gold Star, which had a better track record of working with food producers that met the GFPP baseline values.

“The policy is a tool to hold companies, like Tyson, that are hurting workers, communities, animals, and our planet accountable,” says Joann Lo, co-director of the FCWA and a co-chair of the working group that developed the GFPP. “These companies don’t deserve our tax dollars.”

In one example, Gold Star partnered with Shepherd’s Grain to source wheat from Robinson Ranch, a family-owned sustainable wheat farm in Merced, California. The wheat is grown for LAUSD on the farm, milled in Los Angeles, and baked into 40 million dinner rolls, knotted buns, and other kinds of bread for the students. Robinson Ranch benefit, says Ewing, because they have a guaranteed customer in LAUSD, which buys about 160,000 bushels of wheat a year.

“The farmer knows that the food is already sold,” says Ewing. “They don’t have to hedge their bets.”

Challenges remain, but the model is being replicated.

Still, Delwiche acknowledges that implementing the policy at the nearly 1,100 schools in LAUSD, didn’t come without challenges. Initially, many school administrators didn’t understand what the GFPP was, not to mention why it was important, or how it worked. Plus, all five values—local, sustainable, humane, fair, and healthy—must hang together and cannot be separated for the sake of ease or simplicity. And all producers and distributors must be checked to verify that they meet (and continue to meet) the baseline in all five categories. This is a time-intensive prospect.

“When the policy was adopted in Los Angeles, we had not given any thought to implementation,” admits Delwiche. “The breakthrough was that we created a holistic vision. But, in reality, it’s way too complicated for anyone who is just trying to do their job, and might not have a food systems background.”

The Center for Good Food Purchasing developed in response to those early challenges. They act as a national clearinghouse for the GFPP, providing analysis, tools, and guidance to help schools and other institutions navigate the initial steps of signing on.

Los Angeles has become an example of what’s possible when values-based procurement becomes the norm. Now, food advocates in Long Beach are lobbying the city government to adopt the policy. And San Francisco Unified School District paid attention. At the end of May, the S.F. Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the GFPP, becoming only the second school district in the country to do so.

“You see a lot of people who say they are going to do something, and there’s a lot of hype and promotion, and when it all goes away, they don’t do what they said they were going to do,” says Stephanie Ewing at Gold Star Foods. “If LAUSD is capable of doing this, then why can’t everybody else?”

Stay tuned for part two in this series, which examines how the Good Food Purchasing Policy and other institutional buying efforts are taking root all around the U.S.

]]>Before I became a journalist, I worked for years in food service. None of the jobs I had paid particularly well. At one coffee shop in a gentrified San Diego neighborhood, I realized I had a better chance of being struck by lightning then getting a raise or benefits so I got fed up and took my complaints to the owners, but they fell on deaf ears. I quit soon after in search of more lucrative work.

I was lucky. Many of the six million people working in the lowest-paying sector of the American economy—the restaurant industry—aren’t in a position to search for something better. In her new book, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, Saru Jayaraman, cofounder of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, shares no shortage of case studies about people trying to survive on meager wages in food service jobs with little or no mobility.

There’s April, a young, single mom from southwest Michigan, who works as a server at the Olive Garden. She tells Jayaraman that she has been sexually harassed by coworkers and customers and she has watched fellow employees without sick leave work through fevers, sneezing fits, and asthma attacks. April’s hourly pay is so low that she depends almost completely on tips. Without a guaranteed paycheck, she has been forced to move back in with her mother.

Or take the story of Sandy, a former Subway employee who never made more than $9 an hour, despite 16 years with the company and a managerial promotion. “Without child support from my ex-husband, I would have had to go on food stamps,” she says.

And these women are not alone. Eighty-six percent of food industry workers are earning either subminimum, poverty, or low wages. And 14 percent depend on public assistance to make ends meet. This dismal statistic would be a serious issue on its own, but as it stands, the restaurant industry is one of the fastest growing employment sectors. In a recession or an economic boom, Americans love going out to eat. Which begs the question: Why aren’t the workers who serve and prepare that food compensated accordingly?

Jayaraman is intimately familiar with bleak reality that April and Sandy share with so many other servers across the U.S. She’s a driving voice in the Fight for $15 campaign and the struggle against the lower, federal tipped minimum wage—frozen at $2.13 for two decades. In 2015, she came out publicly against tipping.

In the introduction, Jayaraman describes Forked as a “guide for anyone who eats out and anyone who wants to eat better and more ethically.” To that effect, Forked is divided into user-friendly chapters by restaurant type: family-style and casual, Mexican food, fine-dining, burger joints, sandwich shops, coffee shops, and diners. Each chapter dives into the history, origin, and current treatment of workers at one “low-road” restaurant (i.e., a business treating workers poorly) and one “high-road” restaurant (one treating them fairly).

The “high-road,” employers Jayaraman mentions include Chipotle, In-N-Out Burger, Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurants, and Busboys and Poets. According to ROC research, these businesses pay a living wage, offer benefits and paid sick days, and provide opportunities for “internal mobility regardless of workers’ race or gender.”

Jayaraman calls out Darden Restaurants—the parent company of Olive Garden and the Capital Grille—in particular for low wages, policies that often result in sick employees showing up to work, and lax enforcement of sexual harassment policies.

“Sixty-six percent of the almost six million tipped workers in America are women; a large majority work in casual restaurants like the Olive Garden, Applebee’s, or IHOP. Tipped workers’ median wage is $9.08 an hour including tips; these women suffer three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce and use food stamps at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce,” she writes.

Early on in Forked, Jayaraman takes a shallow dive into the history of tipping. Interestingly, after wealthy Americans brought the custom of tipping back from Europe, a strong anti-tipping movement railed against the practice, calling it “despicable” and “undemocratic.” But, the practice caught on, especially when American hospitality and railway companies fought in favor of tipping on the premise that they shouldn’t have to pay wages to their employees—many of which were former African-American slaves—because the workers were earning tips.

“The impetus for these industries to be able to hire workers and not pay them at all, arose in part from the nation’s history of subjugation based on race,” writes Jayaraman. Eventually, despite the fact that other countries moved away from tipping, it became entrenched by custom, law, and federal policy here in the U.S.

Jayaraman places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), the federal lobbying group for the restaurant industry. Or the “other NRA,” as ROC puts it. The group has lobbied to “keep the minimum wage as low as possible,” she writes. In fact, congressional legislation passed in 1996, thanks to negotiation tactics by former NRA president and once-presidential candidate Herman Cain, froze the federal minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13 an hour. It hasn’t increased since.

“When you are a tipped worker who receives between $2.13 and $5 an hour … your wage is so small it goes entirely to taxes, and you get a paystub with $0 that says, ‘This is not a paycheck,’” writes Jayaraman. “As a result, a vast majority of tipped workers in America live completely off their tips, which creates extraordinary economic instability. It’s a system, she says, that demands tax payers to subsidize low-road restaurants in two ways: by paying workers’ wages through tips, and by paying for those same workers’ economic survival through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicare.

A handful of states have bucked the trend and passed their own legislation raising, or in some instances, doing away with the tipped minimum wage. For decades, California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Alaska, Nevada, and Minnesota, have had the same wages for tipped and non-tipped workers. Still, the restaurant service industry stands as the lowest-paying employer in the U.S. Not surprisingly, a dependence on tips has left employees, especially women, vulnerable to unwelcome advances from customers. Jayaraman recounts the many instances when women approached her after a book talk to tell their own stories of sexual harassment and assault while working as servers in restaurants.

Consumer power, Jayaraman argues in the book’s conclusion, is the best way to ensure higher wages, benefits and mobility for restaurant workers in the United States. To make it easier for diner’s to decide where to spend their money, ROC developed the Diners Guide to Ethical Eating app. The app rates the 100 most popular restaurant chains and points customers towards a few dozen “responsible restaurant employer partners.”

Unfortunately, the choices for “high-road” restaurants—aside from those with a larger presence like In-N-Out Burger and several of ROC’s own worker-owned restaurants—are pretty limited. That could change if more consumers start using the app. It also isn’t clear what customers should do if they are searching for high-road restaurants in their own towns. It’s one thing to suggest that we ask employees at our favorite restaurants, how they are treated, but it’s another to put that into action without feeling somewhat awkward. Still, it’s a start. In addition to using the app to find “high-road” restaurants to support, Jayaraman urges consumers to lobby their elected officials to end the two-tier wage system, to talk with restaurateurs about their values, and to hold low-road employers accountable through calls and emails.

“What’s hidden in plain sight as we talk and talk about food is the glaring mistreatment of people whose work makes restaurants such an integral part of the U.S. culture and economy,” writes Jayaraman. “Fair pay for the people who prepare and serve us our meals is the final frontier for the food service industry—and for a society that loves eating out.”